mercredi 2 août 2017

Robert Steuckers

Translation: https://institutenr.org

A denunciation of the mechanized titanism of Western thought, this
work is the quarry from which all contemporary ecological thought draws
in order to refine its critiques. Divided into two parts and one
excursus, themselves divided into a multitude of small concise chapters,
the work begins with an observation: Utopian literature no longer takes
politics as its subject matter, but technology, which causes a
disenchantment with the Utopian line of thought. Technology resolves
none of man’s existential problems. It doesn’t increase leisure time; it
doesn’t reduce work: it only replaces manual labor with “organized”
labor. Moreover, it doesn’t create new wealth, on the contrary it
condemns the condition of the worker to pauperism.

The deployment of technology was due to a general lack that reason
sought to fill. But this lack didn’t disappear with the encroachment of
technology: it only camouflaged it. The machine is a devourer,
annihilating substance: its rationality is henceforth illusory. The
economist believes, at first, that technology is the generator of
wealth, then he realizes that its quantitative rationality is only an
illusion, technology, in its infinite will to perfect itself, only
follows its own logic, which is not economic. The modern world is
henceforth characterized by a tacit conflict between the economist and
the technician: the latter seeks to determine the processes of
production despite profitability, a factor judged to be too subjective.
Technicality, when it attains its highest degree, leads to a
dysfunctional economy.

This opposition between technology and the economy will astonish more
than one critic of contemporary uni-dimensionality, accustomed to
putting economic and technological hypertrophies on the same level. But
Friedrich-Georg Jünger saw economy as its etymology implicitly defined
it, setting the standards of oikos, the housekeeping of man, well
circumscribed in time and space. The establishment of oikos doesn’t
proceed from an excessive mobilization of resources, similar to the
economy of pillage and la razzia [Translator’s note: referring to slave
raids conducted by the Barbary Pirates] (Raubbau), but a parsimonious
enrichment of the place one occupies on earth.

The central idea of Friedrich-Georg Jünger regarding technology,
states that it is an automatism dominated by its own logic. Once that
logic starts forward, it escapes its creators. It multiplies itself in
an exponential manner: machines demand the creation of other machines,
until achieving complete automation, both mechanical and dynamic, at an
extremely regimented pace, thus in a fatal pace. This fatal pace
penetrates into the organic tissue of the human being and submits man to
its deadly logic. Henceforth man no longer possesses his own pace,
internal and biological, but feverishly seeks to adapt to the inorganic /
fatal pace of the machine. Life inexorably comes to be submitted to the
grand automation that technology produces, which ultimately regulates
life entirely.

This generalized automatism is the “perfection of technology,” to
which Friedrich-Georg Jünger, an organicist thinker, contrasts
maturation (die Reife), which only natural beings can attain, without
violence or coercion. The major characteristic of gigantic technological
organization, dominant in the contemporary era, is the exclusive
domination exercised by technology’s own determinations and causal
deductions. The state, as a political body, can acquire, by means of
technology, more power. But that is, for him, a sort of pact with the
devil as the principles of technology then imply the extirpation of
organic substance and its replacement by technological automation.

Whoever says total automation means total organization, in the sense
of management. Labor, in the era of the exponential multiplication of
automation, is organized to the point that it detaches itself from the
ergonomic immediacy provided by hand and tool. This detachment leads to
excessive specialization, normalization, standardization. To this
Friedrich-Georg Jünger adds the concept of Stückelung (splitting,
cutting, “division into pieces”) where “fragments” are no longer parts
(pars, partes, Teile) of a whole but pieces (Stücke) reduced to serving a
function in a device.

Friedrich-Georg Jünger joins Marx to denounce the alienation of these
processes but distinguishes himself from Marx when he considers the
process to be fatal so long as one remains chained/ connected (gekettet
/angeschloßen) to the technological-industrial apparatus. The worker
(Arbeiter) is a worker precisely because he is connected volens nolens
[Translator’s note: Latin, willingly or unwillingly] to this apparatus.
The condition of the worker doesn’t depend on the modesty of his wages
but on this connection, independent of the amount of salary. The
depersonalized connection causes the loss of the personal quality. The
worker is he who has lost the internal bond that ties him to his work,
the relation that makes interchangeability impossible, between him and
another worker or between his purpose and another purpose. So alienation
is not primarily economic, as Marx thought, but technical.

The general progression of automation devalues all labor directly
derived from the interior character of the worker and triggers the
process of natural destruction, the process of “devouring” (Verzehr)
substance (the resources offered by Mother Nature, the generous donor).
Because of this alienation by the technical order, the worker is hurled
into a world of exploitation without the least protection. In order to
benefit from a semblance of protection, he must create organizations,
notably unions, but those remain connected to the
technological-industrial apparatus.

The protective organization doesn’t emancipate, it enchains. The
worker defends himself against alienation and “division into pieces” but
paradoxically accepts the system of total automation. Marx, Engels, and
the first socialists only saw political and economic alienation, and
not technological alienation. Among them, no one took machines
seriously. The dialectic of Marx, from this fact, became a sterile
mechanicism, in the service of mechanized socialism. Socialism retained
the same logic as total automation under the capitalist aegis. Even
worse, its triumph would not put an end to automated alienation but
would cause this movement to accelerate, by simplifying it and
increasing it.

The creation of organizations generalizes total mobilization, which
makes all things mobile and all places like workshops or laboratories
buzz with incessant agitation. Any social sphere that tries to escape
this total mobilization counteracts the movement and consequently
endures repression: thus concentration camps open, mass deportations and
collective massacres begin. It’s the rule of the unrestricted manager, a
sinister figure appearing under a thousand masks.

Technology doesn’t produce harmony, the machine is not a goddess that
dispenses blessings. On the contrary, it sterilizes the giving natural
substrates, it organizes pillage to the ends of the Wilderness. The
machine is a devourer, it must be unceasingly fed and, because it
consumes more than it gives, it exhausts the riches of the Earth.
Enormous elementary natural forces are hijacked by the gigantic
technological machinery and its imprisoned retinues, which often leads
to explosive catastrophes and demands constant surveillance, another
facet of total mobilization.

The masses embroil themselves, voluntarily, in this total automation,
annihilating isolated resistances, individual consciences, in the same
stroke. The masses allow themselves to be carried by the hectic movement
of automation, so that in the case of failure or a momentary halt in
the linear movement towards automation, they experience a feeling of
emptiness that seems insufferable to them.

Henceforth war is also totally mechanized. The destructive potential
are amplified to extremes. But the shine of uniforms, the mobilizing
worth of symbols, the glory, fades. We expect nothing but endurance and
tenacious courage from soldiers.

The absolute mobility initiated by total automation turns against
everything that retains endurance and stability, notably property
(Eigentum). Friedrich-Georg Jünger, by posing this assertion, defines
property in an original manner: the existence of machines rests on an
exclusively temporal conception; the existence of property rests on a
conception of space. Property implies limits, demarcation, hedges, walls
and fences, enclosures. Technological collectivism wants to make these
limits disappear.

Property creates a limited, circumscribed field of action, enclosed
in a determined, precise, space. In order to progress vectorially,
automation must break down the locks of property, the obstacle to the
establishment of its omnipresent communication and connection networks. A
humanity deprived of any form of property cannot escape total
connection.

Socialism, by denying property, by refusing what remains in the world
of “enclosed” zones, exactly facilitates absolute connection. Thus the
possessor of machines is not an owner; the mechanized capitalist
undermines the order of property, characterized by endurance and
stability, to the benefit of an all-dissolving dynamism. Personal
independence is only possible if there is no connection between events
and the technical apparatus’ way of thinking and organization.

Between his critical and acerbic reflections on automation and the
excessive technicality of modern times. Friedrich-Georg Jünger
challenges the great philosophers of the European tradition. Descartes
initiated a dualism that established an insurmountable separation
between the body and the mind and eliminates the systema influxus
physici that both relied on, in order replace it with punctual divine
intervention that made God a watchmaker. The res extensa [Translator’s
note: corporeal substance] is a dead thing: it its explained as an
arrangement of mechanisms in which man, the instrument of the watchmaker
God, can intervene at any moment with impunity. The res cogitans
[Translator’s note: the mental substance] is then established as the
absolute master of the mechanical processes ruling the universe. Man can
become like God: a watchmaker who can manipulate everything to his
will, without fear or respect. Cartesianism gave the signal for the
exorbitant technical exploitation of the planet.

Robert Steuckers – Vouloir n°45/46, 1988

Translation: https://institutenr.org

To
place the German “New Right” under the magnifying glass is not an easy
thing; firstly because term was neither used nor claimed by the men and
groups that journalists arbitrarily pigeonholed under this label.
Actually, the term “Neue Rechte” is a creation of journalists, a lazy
verbal convenience that designates attempts at ideological and practical
innovation which occurred in the “nationalist” camp in West Germany.
Recently, Margret Feit tried to investigate this rarefied world and
released a book, a dense 244 pages abounding with useful information,
but, alas, also incongruous commentary and erroneous simplifications.

The
reason for these derailments is simple: M. Feit is a professional
anti-fascist militant, one of these Don Quixotes who, forty years after
the spectacular collapse of Hitler’s Reich, spends their time harassing
increasingly antiquated phantoms. But the variant of her Don Quixotism
diverges a bit from that of her Francophone colleagues in the vein of
Article 31 (Paris)
or Celsius (Brussels); who get completely befuddled, fabricating
incredible plots where we see, for example, the Belgian Justice Minister
Jean Gol, liberal and Israeli, plan the emergence of a gigantic
paramilitary network with the former leader of the movement Jeune
Europe, Jean Thiriart, and a representative of Zaire’s president, Mobutu
Sese Seko in the backroom of a Brussels restaurant! M. Feit doesn’t
take the joke that far.

Why Read This Book

If
the “who’s who” of Article 31, Celsius, their Flemish buddy who rages
in Morgen and the no less unerring Maurice Sarfatti, alias Serge Dumont,
scribbler at Vif / L’Express, whose colleagues privately scoff at him,
politely saying, “he’s still a big adolescent…”, all sink into charming
fantasy, the incurable childishness from son to father of the Golden
Sixties, M. Feit accomplishes a more serious task; she’s from the
masochist variant, which (poorly) stalks its own phantoms but also
collects authentic documents in order to denounce, what she believes to
be, a veritable network, infested with wickedness and ready leap upon
poor democracy like the wolf does to the tender little lamb in the
fables. But Dame Feit is an archivist, she cites her sources and that’s
why her book is noteworthy, even if it doesn’t contain an index and the
outline of its chapters, which intends to be an analysis of the
intellectual content of the “Neue Rechte”, is purely and simply taken
from the useful and well written book published in 1975 from the pen of
Günter Bartsch (1).

It’s
worth more than a note if we rid ourselves of her fantasies, which
return to every paragraph at a full gallop, in order to be constantly
repelled by the terrible energy displayed by M. Feit’s quasi-neurotic
desire to acquire a shred of scientific respectability. Let us therefore
consider that this book has a certain value, which remains hidden
behind an undergrowth of fantasies, and one must know how to read it
with the dexterity of a professional pathfinder.

The Nationalist Camp Before the Advent of the “Neue Rechte”

In
1946, the DReP (Deutsche Rechts-Partei ; German Right Party) appeared, a
fusion of the DKoP (Deutsche Konservative Partei) and the DAP (Deutsche
Aufbau-Partei ; German Reconstruction Party), two groups formed in
1945. The DReP, lead by Fritz Dorls and Fritz Rößler, was too
heterogeneous to endure; the conservative wing separated from the
socialist wing which, with two party leaders, formed the SRP
(Sozialistische Reichs-Partei) in 1949. In October 1952, the government
banned this party, under the pressure of the allies, who were disturbed
because it demonstrated a certain dynamism (1951: 11% of the vote in
Basse-Saxe and 16 seats). The party was opposed to the pro-Western
policy of Adenauer, fighting for a unified neutral Germany and seriously
competing with the “left” thanks to its audacious social program. M.
Feit doesn’t utter a word about this resolutely non-right-wing
engagement … The ban forced its militants to change their symbols and
modify their style of propaganda. The DRP (Deutsche Reichs-Partei) would
take over from it, again registering a certain success in Basse-Saxe
(8.1%, more than the liberals from the FDP). However economic recovery
played in favor of the confessional parties and the SPD.

From Statist Nationalism to Plebiscitary Nationalism and “Basisdemokratisch”

Following
the failure and ban of the SRP and the stagnation of the DRP,
nationalist milieus turned upon themselves. The most audacious rejected
all forms of pro-Occidentalism and chose neutralism or a German form of
Gaullism. But the criticisms essentially focused on the relics of
Bismarckian statism passed on by the “old nationalist” leaders of the
SRP and DRP. The organizational nucleus of this hostile revision to
centralizing statism was the DG (Deutsche Gemeinschaft ; German
Community) of August Haußleiter, who came from the Bavarian CSU. This DG
was nationalist, neutralist and anti-liberal, in the sense intended by
the principal protagonists of the Weimar era “konservative Revolution.”
This group aspired to legitimize the state on the basis of popular will,
the generator of popular harmony and conviviality, not on the power of
the party that won the elections. From the start, with such a program
declared for the 2 German republics and Austria, the militants of the DG
took the side of colonized peoples fighting to acquire independence
(Nasserist Egypt, the Algerian FLN, etc) as these fights were aligned
with the German will to gain self-determination.

In
May 1965, while the remnants of the DRP reassembled with a new
formation, the NPD (National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands), founded
in November 1964, the DG, with the DFP (Deutsche Freiheits-Partei ;
German Freedom Party) and the VDNV (Vereinigung Deutsche
National-Versammlung ; Association for A German-National Rally), evolved
into the AUD (Aktionsgemeinschaft Unabhängiger Deutsche ; Action
Community of German Independents). A divide arose immediately: the old,
statist nationalists found themselves in the NPD, while the left wing of
the nationalists, with its principal intellectuals, found themselves in
the AUD.

From the AUD to the Opening to Left Wing Movements and Ecologism

We
note that the VDNV counted Wolf Schenke, founder of a “third way”
concept and a partisan of neutrality, and the historian Wolfgang Venohr
(cf. Orientations n°3),
in its ranks. The AUD, faithful to its populist and organic will and
its refusal of the old statist and quasi-fascist formulas, opened itself
to the leftist APO (Außerparlamentarische Opposition ;
Extra-parliamentary Opposition) and made a number of pacifist and
neo-democratic (whose objective is the erection of a democracy beyond
parties and traditional ideological family) arguments. The negotiations
with the APO would fail (although many leaders of the APO and the SDS,
its student organization, would find themselves in the neo-nationalist
camp in the 1980s) and the militants of the AUD would establish
ecological circles, in the name of an organic ideology, a very romantic
and Germanic tradition: the protection of Life (Lebensschutz). Many of
its militants would create, with the most left wing elements, the famous
“Green Party” that we know today.

The Strasserists: “Third Way,” European Solidarism

The
Strasserists, grouped around Otto Strasser, constituted a supplementary
component of neo-nationalism after 1945. After the collapse of the
Third Reich, Otto Strasser, then in Canadian exile, sent Rundbriefe für
Deutschlands Erneuerung (Circulars for German Renewal) to his
sympathizers in mass quantities. These circulars mentioned German
unification on the basis of a “European third way,” centered around a
solidarism that dismissed both Western liberal capitalism and Soviet
style socialism. This solidarism would abolish class distinction, by
forming a new leading elite. German unity, as seen by Strasser, implied
armed neutralism, the future military nucleus of an independent Europe
that should become an equal, if not superior, political power to the USA
and USSR. This Europe would ally with the Third World, as Third World
countries would furnish raw materials to the “European Federation”
during its gestation.

In
order to support and spread this program, the West German Strasserists
founded the DSU (Deutsche Soziale Union) in 1954. Many
national-revolutionary militants made their first commitments there,
notably Henning Eichberg between 1956 and 1959. In 1961, he passed to
the VDNV of Venohr and Schenke (cf. supra). This passage implied an
abandonment of the neo-Strasserists’ statism and centralism and an
adherence to populist democracy, which the AUD championed.

Worker’s Self Management and the Nationalism of Liberation

In
this same movement, the “Vötokalisten” grouped around E. Kliese
appeared. This political circle elaborated an new theory of worker’s
self-management, derived from the principles of “German socialism” (cf.
Orientations n°7 and Trasgressioni n°4),
the only true revision of Marxism in this century. This theory of
worker’s self-management formed the nucleus of the social doctrine of
the UAP (Unabhängige Arbeiter Partei), another group created at the
start of the 1960s which desired to be “the combat group for a
libertarian and democratic socialism of the German nation.” Vötokalisten and
the militants of UAP laid claim to Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of
German social democracy and admirer of Bismarck’s work. Here the French
reader will note how close social democracy is to the different variants
of German neo-nationalism.

This German socialism, with Lassallian connotations, opposed the NPD, judged to be excessively right wing, as
much as the communists and the SPD, judged to be traitors to the
socialist ideal. An important personality appeared in this movement:
Wolfgang Strauss, former militant from the East German Liberal Party
(LDPD) and former convict in Vorkuta. Strauss was the advocate of a
popular socialism and a nationalism of liberation, whose model was
derived from the Ukrainian resistance, Russian solidarism, and the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956, among others. In this view, nationalism is
conceived as the emotional yeast that gives rise to a socialism close
to the people, resolutely anti-imperialist, hostile to large scale
entities, ethno-pluralist. The Decline of the NPD

Despite
a few initial successes in the Länder elections, the NPD never
surpassed the score of 4.3% (in 1969) for the federal vote. The party
was divided between idealists and opportunists, while the movement for
democratic, neo-socialist and proto-ecological nationalism attracted
more intellectuals and students. This sociological stratification
effectively lead to the principal ideological innovations of German
neo-nationalism on the eve of the agitations of 68. If one is interested
in this constant germination rather than fixed structures, an analysis
of the student organizations that were created on the margins of the NPD
(and often in direct opposition to it) will be very useful.

Many
initiatives happened in quick succession in the academic world. Among
them, the BNS (Bund Nationaler Studenten ; National Student’s League) in
1956, on the impetus of Peter Dehoust, currently the director of the
magazine Nation Europa (Coburg). Dehoust and his companions wanted to
base the political combat of the nationalists on an engagement in the
domain of culture from every angle, which, in the German political
language, calls for the start of a new Kulturkampf. The disciplines
favored by this “Kulturkampf” were of course history and biopolitics.
The BNS assuredly constituted a well conceived organizational model, but
its ideological message was, in many aspects, more conservative than
the program and the intentions of the DG, which later became the AUD.

The
organizations that took over in the 1960s, between the development of
the NPD and the agitation of 67-68, were more faithful to revolutionary
populism and quite hostile to the last strains of statism. In October
1964, Sven Thomas Frank, Bodo Blum and Fred Mohlau founded the IDJ
(Initiative der Jugend ; Youth Initiative) in Berlin, which in 1968,
would merge with a few other militant organizations to form the APM
(Außerparlamentarische Mitarbeit ; Extra-Parliamentary Cooperation);
this new initiative was clearly modeled on the leftist APO
(Außerparlamentarische Opposition). The APM aimed to bring together,
with the nationalists, those who didn’t renounce the idea of German
reunification, and who hadn’t stopped considering Berlin to be the sole
capital of all Germany.

Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl Slide Towards A Form of Nationalism

Günther
Bartsch relevantly underlines, contrary to M. Feit, that, despite the
initial divide caused by the national question, all the student groups,
leftists as well as nationalists, slid towards a new, militant
nationalism of protest. Bartsch recalls that the 2 leftist leaders in
Berlin in 68, Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl, didn’t raise the stale
equation: “nationalism = fascism” at all. On the contrary, quite early
on, Rabehl insisted that nationalist motivations had played a first rank
role in the French, Russian, Yugoslav, and Chinese Revolutions in many
theoretical texts.

According
to Rabehl, nationalism dialectically receives a progressive utility; it
catalyzes the process of history and provokes the acceleration of class
conflicts, from which socialist revolutions unfold. National ideology
can give a unifying discourse to the different components of the working
class. Rabehl continues, on the global scale, a German neo-nationalism,
carried by the working class, can undermine the American-Soviet
condominium, the embodiment of reaction and stagnation in the 20th century, just like the “Metternich system,” arising from the Congress of Vienna, was at the start of the 19th.

Dutschke,
with all his charisma, supported this slide initiated by his comrade
Rabehl. He even went further: he wrote that in the 20th century
Germany had experienced 3 forms of revolutionary worker’s socialism:
the socialist SPD, the communist KPD, and … Hitler’s NSDAP (which he
nevertheless criticized for certain compromises and diplomatic
orientations). This (very) partial rehabilitation of the historic role
of the NSDAP shows that Manichean anti-fascism, which rages today, no
longer dominated the discourse among the serious leftist theorists of
the 1960s. Margret Feit evidently doesn’t utter a word about this slide
towards nationalism and dogmatically avoids looking into the theoretical
value of this common argument of the “New Left” and the “New Right.”
Bartsch notes that the militants of the left and the young nationalists
had a good number of shared ideas, notably:

The refusal of the establishment

Criticism of consumer society

Hostility to media manipulations

The refusal of hyper-specialization

An anti-technocratic attitude with ecological connotations

Anti-capitalism and the will to form a new socialism

The myth of the revivifying youth

An anti-bourgeois attitude where Marxism and Nietzscheanism closely mingle

The will to question absolutely everything

Why
didn’t nationalists and leftists march together against the system, if
their positions were so close? Bartsch thinks it’s because nationalists
still conveyed the images and references of the past in an overly
stereotypical manner, while the left wielded “critical theory” with a
remarkable dexterity and benefited from the resounding impact of
Marcuse’s book, The One-Dimensional Man, [cf. The critical analysis of
M. Haar, L’Homme unidimensionnel, Hatier/Profil d’une œuvre, 1975]. The
gap between their “styles” was still insurmountable.

“Junges Forum” and “Junge Kritik” : a laboratory of ideas in Hamburg

The
magazine Junges Forum, founded in 1964 in Hamburg, envisioned “laying
the theoretical bases of a new thought” from the outset. The will that
guided this intention, was motivated by the desire leave the strictly
political ghetto, where it saw total stagnation regarding the
recruitment of new militants, and suggest a new message to depoliticized
citizens, capable of gaining their interest and rousing them from their
torpor. Those who were named by M. Feit as the “head thinkers” of the “
Neue Rechte” published articles and manifestos in the columns of Junges
Forum. Among
them: Wolfgang Strauss, Lothar Penz, Hans Amhoff, Henning Eichberg and
Fritz Joß. The themes addressed concerned: intellectual renewal, the
search for a more satisfactory form of democracy, the elaboration of an
organic socialism, German reunification, European unity, outlining an
international order based on organic principles, ecology, regionalism,
solidarism, etc.

In
1972, the editorial committee of the magazine published a 36 point
manifesto, whose stated objective was to propose the basis for a popular
and organic socialism, capable of constituting a coherent alternative
to the dominant liberal and Marxist ideologies (the text, without notes,
is reproduced in full in the appendix to Bartsch’s book). This
manifesto exercised a relatively modest influence among us, notable in
certain circles close to the Volksunie, among Flemish solidarists,
regionalists, some neo-socialists and solidarists in Brussels, notably
in the youth magazine Vecteurs (1981) which only published a single issue, where an adapted translation of the program of Junges Forum was
reproduced, by Christian Lepetit, militant of the quasi-Maoist AIB
(Anti-Imperialistische Bond ; Anti-Imperialist League). Robert Steuckers
spread this message into the orbit of the magazine Pour une renaissance
européenne, the organ of GRECE-Bruxelles, directed by Georges Hupin.

European Nationalism, The New Economic Order, Philosophy and Policy

In
parallel with the magazine, a collection of paperback books appeared,
under the title Junge Kritik. More than notebooks of Junges Forum, the
treatises bound into the 3 volumes of Junge Kritik constituted
the essential basis for a total revolution of nationalist thought at
the dawn of the 1970s (the publication of the first 3 booklets extended
from 1970 to 1973). Margret Feit, evidently not interested in the
evolution of the ideas, prefers to fabricate a puzzle from real or
imaginary connections to underpin her latest conspiracy theory.

Objectivity
obliges us to directly refer to the texts. In Volume 1 (Nationalismus
Heute; Nationalism Today), the young leaders Hartwig Singer (pseudonym
of Henning Eichberg), Gert Waldmann and Michael Meinrad argued for a
Europeanization of nationalism, and, consequently, for a liberation of
our entire continent from American and Soviet tutelage. The revised
nationalism would be progressive thenceforth because it would imply the
liberation of our peoples from economic and political oppression,
operating at two speeds (Western and Soviet), as the “dutschkistes” in
Berlin had envisioned, not the conservation of dead structures (as the
old liberal/ Marxist historiography suggests).

In the second volume of Junge Kritik, entitled Leistungsgemeinschaft (community
of service), Meinrad, Joß and Bronner developed the economic program of
neo-nationalism: solidarity of the working classes of all nations,
ownership of means of production by all who worked, drastic limitation
of capitalist concentrations of wealth. Hartwig Singer, for his part,
published a Manifest Neue Rationalität (Manifesto
for a new rationality), where the parallel with the efforts of Alain de
Benoist at the same time is glaringly obvious. Singer and Benoist, in
effect, wanted to launch an offensive against the essentialism of the
dominant ideologies of the era, through the interpretation of
Anglo-Saxon empiricism given by Français Louis Rougier. However, Singer
also added the lessons of Marx, for whom all ideology conceals
interests, and Max Weber, theorist of the process of rationalization in
the West, to this empiricist and Rougierian message. Singer, writing in a
German context totally more revolutionary than the Franco-Parisian
context, struck by an overly literary anti-Marxism, dared to mobilize
Marx, the hard realist, against the abstract and false Marx of the
neo-moralists. Which allowed him to correct Rougier’s apolitical stance
that lead to a socially respectable conservatism incapable of smashing
the practical incoherence of the ambient liberalism of the West.

Neo-Nationalism is “Progressive”

In
the third volume, which was entitled Europäischer Nationalismus ist
Fortschritt (European Nationalism is Progress!), Meinrad, Waldmann, and
Joß reiterated and completed their theses, while Singer, in his
contribution (“Logischer Empirismus”), accentuated the conceptual modernism of Junge Kritik; the proximity of its approach to Alain de Benoist’s in Nouvelle École from 1972-1973 appeared even more evident in the text Manifest Neue Rationalität. Singer not only cited Nouvelle École abundantly
but encouraged his comrades to read Monod, Russell, Rougier, and
Heisenberg, 4 authors studied by Nouvelle École. Singer added that, from
this four way reading, it is possible to deduce a new type of socialism
(Monod and Russell), neo-nationalism (Heisenberg), and a new “European
consciousness” (Rougier). In effect, Rougier had demonstrated that the
European spirit was the only spirit open to progress, capable of
innovation and adaptation. European rationality, according to Rougier,
Benoist, and Singer, largely transcended contemplative oriental ideas
that the hippy vogue had injected into public opinion, in the wake of 68
and the protest against the American war in Vietnam. Neo-nationalism
henceforth appeared progressive, open to modern sciences, just like it
appeared progressive in the eyes of Dutschke and Rabehl because its
energy could break the oppression represented by a macro-political
alienation: the alienation established at Yalta.

This
German-French philosophical pairing didn’t endure: a few years later,
Éléments, the organ of GRECE and Alain de Benoist, attacked the
ecological movement, which the Germans felt directly committed to. In
the scheme of national defense, the French supported a national nuclear
arms program, an approach that the Germans didn’t care about. It was
only in 1982, when A. de Benoist decided completely in favor of German
neutralism, that the respective positions of the Germans and the French
joined together once again.

The Flemish Contribution

In Flanders, where Junges Forum had
its most subscribers outside of Germany, the solidarism and regionalism
of the Hamburg magazine had roused much interest, so much that a good
number of Flemish (meta)political writers contributed to the effort of
Junges Forum. We cite, in no particular order: Jos Vinks (Le
nationalisme flamand, 1977 ; Le pacifisme du mouvement flamand, 1981; La
langue afrikaans, 1987), Roeland Raes (Le régionalisme en Europe,
1979), Willy Cobbaut (L’alternative solidariste, 1981), Frans de Hoon
(Approche positive de l’anarchisme, 1982), Piet Tommissen (Le concept de “métapolitique” chez Alain de Benoist, 1984), Robert Steuckers (Henri De Man, 1986). On the occasion of the 150th anniversary
of Belgian independence, in 1980, Jos Vinks, Edwin Truyens, Johan van
Herreweghe and Pieter Moerman explained the historical roots and
situation of the linguistic quarrel in Belgium, from the Flemish point
of view. The French contribution was limited to a text by Alain de
Benoist defining the “Nouvelle Droite” and an essay by Jacques Marlaud
on the Gramscian theory of meta-politics and its practical application
by the “Nouvelle Droite” in 1984.

One
imagines what would have been a fusion of “dutschkisme”,
neo-Europeanism, and Gramscian praxis in Europe – that’s what a few
Francophone high school students in Brussels, grouped around Christian
Lepetit and Éric Delaan, hoped for, before academic scattering and
military service separated them … The furtive misadventure of Lepetit
and Delaan deserves attention as it shows that neo-socialist and
regionalist neo-nationalism, prefigured by the Germans, had the ability
to seduce boys who militated in the Maoist anti-imperialist movement,
then in full collapse, beyond Germany’s borders.

The National-Revolutionary “Basis Groups”

In parallel with the Junges Forum enterprise,
which continues today and will celebrate 24 years in 1988, the German
neo-nationalist movement constituted “basis groups” (Basisgruppen). The
term came from the vocabulary of leftist protest. The student
organizations of the left spilled over from the universities and invaded
the high schools and factories. The emergence of the “basis groups”
signified that, henceforth, there existed a national-revolutionary
presence in all layers of society. This diversification implied a
decentralization and relative autonomy of local groups who should be
ready to intervene very quickly at any moment in their city, their high
school, their factory, without needing to refer to a central body.

Agitation in Bochum

The
strategy of the “basis group” demonstrated itself in the most
spectacular fashion at the University of the Ruhr in Bochum. A group of
neo-nationalist activists militated effectively there and founded a
journal, the Ruhr-Studenten-Anzeiger. Around
this militant newspaper, a Republikanischer Studentenbund (RSB ; League
of Republican Students) organized in 1968, which aimed to become a
counterweight to the leftist SDS. Conflict would soon follow: the
militants of the RSB criticized the SDS for organizing pointless strikes
in order to consolidate their power over the student masses. In the
course of a blockade organized by the leftists, the RSB took the
university of Bochum by storm and proclaimed, in a populist-Marxist
language, their hostility to the “exploiters” and “bonzes” of the SDS,
having become stakeholders in the new establishment, where leftists had
henceforth been accorded a place. The proclamations of the RSB, drafted
by Singer, were stuffed with citations from Lenin, Marx, and Mao. Singer
also referred to the rhetoric of the German workers in Berlin against
Ulbricht’s communist functionaries, during the June 1953 uprising. The
revolting RSB students insulted the East German functionaries of the
SED, calling them marionettes of the Soviets, “monkeys in glasses,” “fat
cats,” and “paper-pushing reactionaries.” This appropriation of the
Marxist vocabulary and style of Berlin Uprising of 1953 irritated the
leftists as, ipso facto, they had lost the monopoly on militant
shock-language and foresaw a possible intrusion of
national-revolutionaries into their own milieus, with the evident risk
of poaching and counter-attraction.

The
scuffles of 1968 and the nationalists’ adoption of a language drawn
from Marxist ideology, though surprising the SDS, hardly had an echo
beyond the Ruhr and it was confronted with a conspiracy of silence. The
RSB and the Ruhr-Studenten-Anzeiger disappeared,
which didn’t necessarily entail the total disappearance of left-wing
nationalist agitation in Bochum. Thus, at the start of the 1970s, the
nationalists participated in left wing demonstrations against property
speculation and rent increases and they appropriated the slogan of
Trotskyite groups: “The division of Germany is the division of the
German proletariat!” In itself, the adventure of the RBS is significant
for the further evolution of German neo-nationalism (which M. Feit
erroneously calls “Neue Rechte”), it marked its definitive transition to
the left, its exit from the quasi-rightist microcosm in which it was
encrusted, due to the existence of the NPD. The historical weakness and
sterility of “rightism” were proclaimed there and the emphasis was
resolutely placed on socialism, critical reasoning, militant atheism,
and futurism.

Munich and Bielefeld

After
Bochum, other “basis groups” were established and each developed its
own originality. Thus in Munich, Wolfgang Strauss formed a committee of
young workers, high school students, and students, whose objective was
to give them militant culture based on literature and political science.
Strauss named his group Club Symonenko, from the name of a Ukrainian
poet, Wasyl Symonenko, who died in 1963, after enduring Soviet
repression. This committee demanded the liberation of the Ukrainian
historian Valentin Moro, organized soirees with the exiled Polish writer
Zygmunt Jablonski and held rallies on June 17th,
in memory of the Berlin Workers’ Uprising of 1953, distributed
bilingual tracts in favor the IRA and founded a James Connolly “labor
circle”, in honor of the militant union leader and Irish nationalist,
who drew his arguments from Celtic mythology. Its German references were
the poet Georg Büchner, founder of the Society for the Rights of Man in
the 19th century,
and the Romantic poet Theodor Körner, who fought with the Lützow Free
Corps (referenced in the music of Weber) in order to drive the
Bonapartist oppressor and his pillaging troops out of Germany. Strauss
succeeded in laying the basis for an original political culture on the
eve of the 1970s, drawing from the corpus of popular and libertarian
Slavic and Celtic nationalist thought, and reawakening the enthusiasm of
young Germans for their nationalist, libertarian, anarchist, and
radically anti-bourgeois poets at the start of the 19th century. This corpus would be upheld as such in the columns of the magazine Wir Selbst, at the start of the 80s.

If
in Sarre and North Rhine-Westphalia, the “basis groups” ended up
choosing subservience to the NPD – which never stopped being problematic
and causing grave ideological conflicts – in Bielefeld, the NJ-Stadtverband group
(Urban Group of Nationalist Youth), close to the Berliners of the APM,
managed to organize a modern agitation, with records of protest songs
composed by Singer, and printed 4,500 copies of a paper, Wendepunkt!
Never before seen! The editorial strategy was to gather a maximum of
texts and dispatches, coming directly from the militants, and align them
in the columns of the paper; other “basis groups” followed the same
strategy, which allowed them to form a solid cadre, thanks to a good
division of labor and a concentrated mass of militant dispatches.
Militancy thus become lively and profitable.

Five Types of Action

Meinrad
thought coordination between groups should extend to the national
scale, and eliminate the right wing and outmoded NPD. Groups should
number from 15 to 20 local activists self-financed from relatively high
contributions, and regularly conduct 5 types of action, as Bartsch
explains:1 – Commemorations, notably of June 17th 1953 and August 13th 1961, the date the Berlin Wall was erected. 2 – Ecological actions: The group Junges Forum in Hamburg excelled there. It organized Bürgerinitiativen (Citizen’s
Initiatives) against the construction of a highway in the middle of the
city. In this perspective, nationalism meant protecting the natural
integrity of the popular biotope. 3
– Social actions: They were essentially directed against property
speculation, rent increases, and increases in the price of public
transport. These actions also aimed to expose the irrationality of the
functioning of the machinery of the state, which pretended to be a
perfect democracy. 4
– Solidarity actions: they aimed to support Eastern European
nationalist protests, as during the 1970s the West German
neo-nationalist activists thought that German unity could only be
realized through a major upheaval in Eastern Europe. 5
– Resistance actions: especially rowdy protests against the visit of
East German personalities to the West in the framework of Wily Brandt’s
Ostpolitik.

Towards Unity: The NRAO (Nationalrevolutionäre Aufbauorganisation)

The
ensemble of “basis groups” didn’t form a party, structured in a rigid
manner, but a dynamic movement that ceaselessly integrated new
information and facts. Its non-rigidity and diversity set a contemporary
tone and prevented all stagnation, any collapse into itself or into a
fixed corpus of thought. Politics doesn’t only come into play during
elections, or in furtive moments, but it constantly extends into and
pervades daily life. Better: it is ingrained into the consciousness due
to constant agitation, which means that each militant takes to heart the
task of personally disciplining himself every day though reading
newspapers and books, especially those written by his adversaries, which
challenge his essential and untaught cultural references, in order to
better understand the ideological divides that are articulated in the
country.

In
order to amplify the actions of these “basis groups” implanted in
German cities and universities, many of figureheads of this
neo-nationalist (or national-revolutionary) movement decided to create a
“coordination organization” in March 1974, which took the name NRAO or
Nationalrevolutionäre Aufbauorganisation (Organization
for National-Revolutionary Development). Many meetings would be
necessary to establish a common strategy. During the first, which took
place on March 2nd and 3rd 1974
at Würzburg, three orators laid the bases for renewal: Alexander
Epstein (alias Sven Thomas Frank), Lothar Penz and Hans Amhoff.

Epstein’s Speech

Epstein’s
speech revealed, among other things, a willingness to fight “the
enemies on the inside,” refusing ersatz Western European patriotism
(integration into the European Community sold as a panacea by Adenauer’s
friends), and to play the Chinese card against the two superpowers in
international politics. In this manner, Epstein integrated the Maoist
theory of “three worlds” into the national-revolutionary doctrinal
corpus. Moreover, he proposed that the national-revolutionary movement
was the only authentically national movement, because the East German
SED and the West German DKP had sold out to the USSR, while the
bourgeois parties, the SPD, FDP, and the CDU/ CSU were the guarantors of
the American presence, despite the left wing of the SPD, favorable to a
conciliatory Ostpolitik. In this scheme, the NPD placed itself to the
right of the Bavarian CSU through its incurable rightism. Only the
little Berlin Maoist microcosm, publisher of the prestigious magazine
Befreiung, found favor with Epstein, who thus became the advocate of
tacit and courteous cooperation between the Maoists and the
national-revolutionaries.

Epstein,
like Penz and Amhoff, thought that the strategy to follow couldn’t be
clandestine or illegal in any way; as the national-revolutionaries were
the only ones to claim the reunification of the country in a coherent
fashion, their program conformed to the watchword inscribed in the
preamble to the democratic constitution of West Germany, the watchword
that asked the citizens to mobilize all their efforts to restore freedom
and unity to Germany. Consequently, during this meeting in Würzburg,
Penz articulated his “biohumanist” social vision and Amhoff explained
his revised definition of modern national liberation, essentially
anti-imperialist.

The Creation of “Sache des Volkes”

The
geographic dispersion of groups, the different styles of work that each
one had, and some ideological divergences ensured that no centralism
could coordinate the diversity proper to the national-revolutionary
movement. On August 31st 1974,
Epstein (S.T. Frank), Waldmann and Amhoff gathered a thousand
national-revolutionary militants for new projects: to engage in
ecological protest because the massacre of the countryside is the work
of a rootless capitalism without a fatherland; outline a solidarist,
rooted, popular socialism, in the style of the socialism adopted by the
oppressed peoples of the third world; construct workers’ self-management
in the Yugoslav style, etc. The movement Sache des Volkes (SdV; Cause
of the People), which emerged from this meeting, intended to be a part
of a diffuse global moment which fought against capitalism and Soviet
state socialism everywhere in the world.

Hartwig
would flesh out this double refusal, to which the French
national-revolutionary militants also adhered (notably those in Lutte du
Peuple and
the Provençal militants of the CDPU), as well as the Italian and
Belgians of Jeune Europe and its various incarnations. In the speech he
sent to the congress of Sache de Volkes, which would be read to them, he
reminded them it was elementary to refuse Moscow like Washington, but
he also explained that it was necessary to take new facts into account:
the principal enemy was no longer local, nationally based, capitalism
but multinational capitalism which made US and Red Army its police
throughout the world. Singer then designated a more precise, unique
enemy: multinational capital, of which the classical imperialisms
established at Yalta were only instruments. In this view, the policy of
detente only aimed open markets in the East for Western multinational
capitalism.

SdV
expressed itself from 1978 to 1988 in the magazine Neue Zeit, which
continues to be published in Berlin, while a series of pamphlets
punctuated the militant life of the movement like Laser(Düsseldorf),
Ideologie und Strategie, Rebell et Der Nationalrevolutionär in Vienna;
the latter is still published under the direction of Helmut Müller.

Solidaristische Volksbewegung (SVB)

While
the youngest element of the national-revolutionary movement modeled
their offensive strategy on the left’s, the Hamburg militants, gathered
around the magazine Junges Forum and
the figure of Lothar Penz, opted for a “solidarism” more positive than
the critical, offensive, and revolutionary discourse of SdV. From this
practical disagreement, a parallel movement was born, the
Solidaristische Volksbewegung (Solidarist
Folk Movement), whose press organ would be SOL. In 1980, the SVB became
the BDS (Bund Deutscher Solidaristen ; League of German Solidarists),
after having directed the ecological GLU (Grüne Liste Umweltschutz ;
Green List for the Protection of the Environment). In January 1981, SOL merged with Neue Zeit, which became ipso facto the collective organ of SdV and BDS.

“Wir Selbst” and the NRKA

At
the start of the 80s the two groups lost their monopoly on the
national-revolutionary press, due to the appearance of two new factors:
the creation of the prestigious magazine Wir Selbst (Colbenz)
by Siegfried Bublies, and the emergence of a new coordinating network,
the NKRA (National-revolutionärer Koordinationsausschuß ; National
Revolutionary Coordination Committee), supported by the magazine
Aufbruch. Created in Düsseldorf in the wake of the magazine Laser,
previously controlled by SdV, from the start, the NKRA wanted to break
with Neue Zeit in order to address social questions in a more
“progressive” perspective and further accentuate the
national-revolutionary movement’s anti-capitalist critique.

This
evolution arose from the fact that the new members of the Düsseldorf
cell no longer came exclusively from the classical post-war
neo-nationalist network, but often from Marxist-Leninism. These new
elements intended to remain faithful to the “quintuple revolution”
advocated by SdV in the manifesto in 1974. The quintuple revolution
should operate on national, social, ecological, democratic, and cultural
levels. The critique launched by the militants of the NKRA was the
creation of the “second generation” of national-revolutionaries, whose
recent militancy prevented them from falling back into the “errors” of
right wing paleo-nationalism.

New phrases and concepts appeared, notably those of an autogestionary “democracy of councils” (Rätedemokratie) and
a “disconnection” in the style of Albania and North Korea. There were
also new figures who directed the circles and magazines of this “second
generation”: H.J. Ackermann, S. Fadinger, P. Bahn, Armin Krebs (not to
be confused with the Frenchman Pierre Krebs, who founded the magazine
Elemente, the twin sister of GRECE’s magazine, Éléments).

At
the end of 1979, the young nationalist activist Siegfried Bublies
founded the magazine Wir Selbst (We Ourselves; the German translation of
the Irish Gaelic Sinn Fein) where, very soon, the influence of Henning
Eichberg (Hartwig Singer) would make itself felt. He would take up the
pen again to demand, from the viewpoint of revolutionary restoration
shared by the Greens, “basis democracy” (Basisdemokratie), cultural
revolution, the establishment of a decentralized economic order,
socialism with a human face (based on the theses of the Czech economist
of “Prague Spring”, Ota Sik), an approach to life in accordance with
ecology, and ethno-pluralism, the cornerstone of the anthropological
vision of German neo-nationalism. Moreover, Bublies found a formulation
that succinctly explained the meaning of its fight: Für nationale
Identität und internationale Solidarität, that is to say for national
identity and international solidarity. Thus Bublies sought to preserve
the identities of all peoples and unite all those who fought for the
preservation of their essence across the world, beyond ideological,
racial, or religious divides.

“Wir Selbst” : A Forum Noted For German Political Debates

But
political-philosophical essays remained in the minority in the
magazine, which rapidly became a forum for all who sought to address the
German question, never resolved, in a new manner. Wir Selbst thus
opened its columns to personalities who never belonged to the
nationalist movement in the strict sense: the urbanist and ecologist
Konrad Buchwald, the historian Helmut Diwald, the former high ranking
East German official Wolfgang Seiffert, the television producer Wolfgang
Venohr (formerly of the VDNV), the journalist Sebastian Haffner (an
anti-Hitler emigre to New York during the war who returned to
nationalism in the 1980s), the artist-provocateur Joseph Beuys (formerly
of the AUD), professor Schweißfurth (influential member of the SPD),
etc. More recently, the generals Löser and Kießling (cf. Vouloir n°30)
addressed the problems of territorial defense and the reorganization of
the armed forces in a democratic and populist perspective in the columns
of Wir Selbst.

Bublies’
magazine, whose style and presentation were generally high quality,
thus succeeded in positioning itself as a forum where men from various
perspectives could freely debate. The year 1987 saw a slackening in the
pace of publication, due to the fact that the magazine sought to give
itself a definitive tone, which would be neither the activist militancy
of SdV or a pale copy of Marxist militancy. As for the NRKA, it first
evolved in to the NRKB ( NR-Koordinationsbüro; National-Revolutionary
Coordination Bureau), before calling itself more simply, Politische
Offensive. It is certain that the militants of the “second generation”
of national-revolutionaries were torn between, on one hand a fidelity to
the heritage of SdV, and on the other, a will to burn all bridges with
the anti-Marxist “rightism” of national-revolutionaries in 1968. It
seems that the “national-Marxists,” behind Stefan Fadinger, wanted to
separate the “second generation” from traditional
national-revolutionaries, grouped behind Markus Bauer, editor of
Aufbruch. Other figures like Peter Bahn, Karlheinz Pröhuber and Werner
Olles, preferred to remain neutral in this internal debate and expressed
themselves in Wir Selbst.

The NR Movement Between Surfers and Militants

Twenty
years after 68, militancy experienced a low tide across Europe, Guy
Hocquenghem said that “Mao suits” were being recycled in Paris; Lévy and
Glücksmann quickly denied their former commitments, etc. In Germany,
the Marxist left experienced a real crisis, just like the
national-revolutionaries. All the hyper-politicized movements had to
face increasing de-politicization and the hemorrhaging of militants.
Protest, the will to construct alternatives gave way to sunbathing and
surfing, barricades gave way to the seductions of “sea, sex, and sun,”
at least until the day where the stock market crash could no longer be
avoided or stopped.

The
national-revolutionaries and the Sixty-Eighter Marxists exploited a
universe of values that, whether we want it to or no, remains immortal,
even if that seems like a disturbing assumption today. That’s why global
perspectives, which restore the guiding principles of a movement, are
useful: they prepare the way for the next offensive which will
inevitably happen.

Some Conclusions

The
books of Günter Bartsch and M. Feit allow us to grasp the evolution of
German neo-nationalism since 1945. They also allow us to identify the
broad philosophical options of this political movement; which we’ll
cite, in no particular order: a theory of scientific and Eurocentric
knowledge (at least in the initial phase which valued European
rationality and science, supplemented by logical empiricism and the
works of Rougier, Monod and Heisenberg; the French and Germans shared
the same concerns at this moment), biohumanism oscillating between
organic / vitalist anthropology and biological materialism,
ethno-pluralism, national and rooted socialism (the Irish model of James
Connolly and Slavic populism), national liberation, and the idea of a
European space.

A Heterogeneity that Margret Feit Doesn’t Want To Notice

The
label “Neue Rechte” gives the impression that the German movements
qualified as such by M. Feit are the twin brothers of the French
“Nouvelle Droite.” Yet the serious researcher willnotice the
heterogeneity of these two worlds very quickly, despite evident
overlaps, overlaps one could also notice between Dutschke and Eichberg
(alias Singer) or GRECE and the socialist CERES of Chevènement. The
German pseudo-“Neue Rechte” appeared in a more militant situation, less
metapolitical, and drew from different intellectual domains than those
Benoist and his friends in France utilized. If we must find a direct and
clear influence from GRECE in Germany, it’s found with Pierre Krebs,
director of Elemente, with Armin Mohler who revealed the existence of
the French “Nouvelle Droite” to the readership of Criticon, or in the
scattered translations of French neo-rightist texts.

In
the doctrinal scheme, the Germans were not very insistent about
egalitarianism, the warhorse of the French “Nouvelle Droite”; only
Lothar Penz, the theorist of national-revolutionary biohumanist
solidarism, included a few thoughts on biological hierarchies in his
vision of man and the city. Consequently, the impact of aesthetic,
Hellenic, even Celtic paganism was quite reduced in Germany, thought
many of the national-revolutionary activists were adherents of the
“unitarism” of Sigrid Hunke, whose book The True Religion of Europe, was translated in France by éditions Le Labyrinthe in 1985, under Alain de Benoist’s auspices.

If
Bartsch had objectively limited his investigation of the
national-revolutionary movement and demonstrated his desire to avoid any
obfuscation, M. Feit mixes types and includes organizations or magazine
belonging to the classical nationalist right, like Mut, Bernhard
Wintzek’s magazine, or the monthly Nation Europa of
Peter Dehoust, in her analysis of the “Neue Rechte” (an improper term
for the least). She presses this obfuscation even further by including
the conservative Bavarian magazine Criticon of
Caspar von Schrenk-Notzing, close to the Bavarian CSU in certain
respects, in what she believes to be a conspiracy. Reading these various
magazines reveals that the selected themes and philosophical choices
made by each were different, despite intersections quite evidently due
to literary, philosophical, or political current events. Every magazine
possesses its originality and doesn’t want to lose it.

The Brief Venture of the ANR

The
confusion between the national-revolutionary movement and the classical
nationalist right maintained by M. Feit arises the partial observation
of a phenomenon from 1972. In January of that year, dissidence arose
within the Bavarian NPD, inspired by a certain Dr. Pöhlmann. He asked
for a few meetings with Singer, while not endorsing his anti-Americanism
at all. From this dissidence an activist grouping, the ANR (Aktion Neue
Rechte ; Action for a New Right) emerged, which rallied youth
discontent with the NPD, criticizing their party for being too
politically and socially conservative. The venture would last until
November 1973 when the ANR split into many groups:

1 – The national conservatives, who would form the AJR (Aktion Junge Rechte ; Action for a Young Right)2
– The “Hitlermaniacs” (who came, in part, from wacky fans in brown and
black uniforms, with leather and studs, who were sometimes heard
chanting slogans, especially in Dixmunde and the shady restaurants of
big cities, and who, in certain cases, proclaimed a ridiculous
homosexuality where “Aryan” and juvenile bodies were erected as objects
of veneration)3 – Those who returned to the cradle, the NPD4 – Those who evolved towards national-revolutionary ideology

The
presence of a few compromising idiots in the ANR, perpetually drunk and
quickly expelled, allowed the drawing room moralists to infer “Nazism”
from a school of thought that ultimately conveyed an ideology of
synthesis, exercising a real seduction on the free spirits of the
militant left. The phrase “Neue Rechte” is thus erroneously applied to
the national-revolutionary sphere. M. Feit’s tactic is crude: the part
is taken for the whole. The fringe of the ANR that evolved towards
revolutionary nationalism ended up giving its name to all
contemporaneous nationalist movements, even left-wing ones. The
objective of this obfuscation is evident: associate the brawlers in
boots (who can attract media attention) with the modernist
intellectuals, so they cannot influence the broad and free minds of the
dutschkiste and para-dutschkiste left, or bind together the analyses of
GRECE and CERES into a useful ideological bloc in France.

One
evidently notices, in light of these facts, the tactical error
committed by certain leaders of GRECE in accepting and claiming the
“Nouvelle Droite” label that the provocateur journalists of the Parisian
left bourgeoisie accorded them. The M. Feit’s diversion operation found
itself reinforced: the pseudo-“Neue Rechte” is crudely obfuscated with
the “Nouvelle Droite” although they are quite different movements.

Impacts in Flanders and Wallonie

In
Flanders, Pol Van Caeneghem and Christian Dutoit’s attempt at
synthesis, notably with the group Arbeid and the magazines Meervoud and
De Wesp, unfortunately turned into sterile leftism, just like the
brilliant syntheses of Mark Cels-Decorte and Freddy Seghers (close to
Wir Selbst for a time) within the Volksunie and the VUJOs (Cf. volumes
of propaganda entitled Integraal Federalisme — 1976 — and Integraal
Federalisme 2 — 1980). While in Wallonie, Jeune Europe – whose leader
Jean Thiriart had outlined an excellent project of alliances with the
non-aligned states of the Third World, with China and Black American
militants – remained the prisoner of rigid Latin political thought
unsuited to inspire revivifying dynamism, its embryonic and dissident
union USCE (Union des Syndicats Communautaires Européens), under the
leadership of Jean Van den Broeck, Claude Lenoir and Pierre Verhas,
opted for a regionalist organization of our continent and officially
distanced itself from “everything right-wing.”

USCE firstly published Syndicats Européens and
then L’Europe Combat, which would be published until 1978. This
experience was the only serious national-revolutionary attempt in
Wallonie after the failure of Jeune Europe, when Thiriart failed to
spread his anti-Americanism to his right wing audience, which hastened
to betray him. Today, a sympathetic synthesis is emerging on the left,
close to the ecologist ideology, in the columns of the magazine
Wallons-nous.

From “Jeune Europe” to Nothingness

An
incarnation of Jeune Europe which evolved towards a useless
philo-Sovietism, the PCN of the Charleroi native Luc Michel,
unfortunately emerged from the most bizarre extreme-right and neo-nazi
groupuscules, it didn’t manage to take off politically (and for good
reason!) and its editorial enterprise, very instructive for specialists
and historians (Cf. Vouloir n°32/34), stagnated because it didn’t
address problems that directly interest a militant audience. The
magazine Conscience Européenne, which recently devoted several issues to
the economic war between the USA and Europe and the illusion of
detente, suffered from dissension in 1984, which lead to the
establishment of Volonté Européenne and
Cercle Copernic, directed by Roland Pirard, a somewhat bizarre
individual who frequently changes pseudonyms (Bertrand Thomé, Roland Van
Hertendaele, Roland Brabant, etc.) and naively dreams of founding a
neo-Teutonic “order of chivalry!” If Luc Michel performs useful
documentary work and furnishes very interesting analyses, despite his
cliched language, the dissident Pirard sinks into complete caricature,
reinforced by appallingly neglected editorial standards and
confoundingly mediocre analyses, where Hitlermaniac outbreaks
occasionally re-surge, crossbred with a neo-Stalinism and pro-Khomeinism
so ponderous that Soviet cliches seem hyper-lyrical in comparison. So
there’s no hope for the rebirth of the dynamism of Jeune Europe and its
French heir, the CIPRE of Yannick Sauveur and Henri Castelferrus, in
Brussels or Wallonie.

In Conclusion

In
conclusion we can say that the German national-revolutionary movement
constituted a synthesis that situated itself at the crux of leftism and
nationalism and that it still harbors much potential for sincere
militants, those who truly care about social life. Moreover, when one
observes the synthesis realized by Cels-Decorte and Seghers within the
Volksunieentre from 1975 et 1981, we see that a comparable synthesis is
still possible in our countries, apart from any marginal position. We
have to reflect on it.